Blockchains, Cloud & Development

Month: August 2012

At the last Melbourne XDDN meeting, Shane Morris (@ShaneMo) did a great session on “How to be authentically digital”. In it he covered off what the Microsoft Metro design language is and what the principals of it are. He gave a great insight into how the Metro design language pulled in influences from a number of design styes, such as Bauhouse and motion design.

Shane talks about how using the content itself to provide form and structure to the content can be combined with typography hierarchy. He gives examples using his own applications and shows that not all Metro designed applications need to look the same. There is a lot of room for personalisation as long as you keep the core principals in mind.

One of the first Nerdcore artists “Mc Frontalot” sums up the rationale behind Nerdcore succinctly: “Nerdcore hip-hop is the spinning of geek shame into bravo through rapping”. Geeks taking what they love and spinning it into an art form to share with others.

Nerdcore is fine for those that like repetitive beats, however today on twitter there may be the sparks of a new subgenre of music known as the “First World Problem Blues”. Taking the melancholy and sadness inherent in blues music, but using it to lament on the problems we suffer daily in the first world (examples of this meme can be found here http://www.quickmeme.com/First-World-Problems/).

It started off innocently enough with a well known geek specialising in “Visual Studio Team Foundation”, asked an innocent question on twitter:

Before TechEd kicks off, get hands-on coding time in the ultimate 24-hour hackathon for building Windows 8 apps. Join us on the Gold Coast a day earlier to get into the guts of app building with our Windows 8 Dev speakers and other industry experts.

You can get skilled up in Windows 8 apps, brainstorm ideas and code like there’s no tomorrow. Our expert mentors will work with you as you build your own Windows 8 app intended for the Store, rather than playing with sample applications.

I speak at a lot of user groups and developer conferences. I was even able to speak at Microsoft ReMix one year which was amazing. But one goal I’d set myself 8 years ago and had never hit was “Get a speaking slot at TechEd”. I’m really excited to announce that I can finally cross it off the list as I will be speaking at TechEd Australia this year!

My presentation will be on Windows 8 development. I will discuss a few basics of data binding, move onto the MVVM pattern, and show how we can construct all the pieces we need by hand.

I hope to see you all in my talk, and Infragistics will have a booth in the expo hall, so please come say hello.